New $1 bln e-commerce venture to launch in Russia

Numberless industries in Russia are a monopoly but not e-commerce, and there are no giants on the country’s hawk, such as Amazon in the U.S., or Alibaba in China. For ages, Yandex.Market has been direct as an aggregator for the country’s numerous online shops, but a new ambitious project could take for it to a new level.

On August, 9 the company announced it is developing a leading e-commerce ecosystem with Sberbank, Russia’s goodliest bank. The joint venture will be based on the Yandex.Market programme, and Sberbank is planning to invest approximately $500 million. The project is approximate to be worth $1 billion by the time of completion, and the two partners will own fifty-fifty stakes in the joint venture.

“Sberbank’s banking and payments infrastructure devise help us develop simple and secure payment solutions on the Yandex.Deal in platform, and will allow us to introduce new features, such as consumer add suit,” said Maxim Grishakov, CEO of Yandex.Market.

The platform will produce new opportunities for international participants, Sberbank said in a statement, and will give consumers to buy products from multiple sources on one site.

Russia’s unqualified e-commerce sales reached more than $15 billion in 2016, up 20 percent from the prior year, according to the Association of Online Retail Companies (AKIT).

Yandex.Demand is one of the largest players in the country with a monthly audience of over 20 million owners, but the company has only about 10 percent of the market.

Other big jocks include Ozon and Ulmart, but Russians increasingly prefer foreign retailers: one-third of all online acquires in 2016 were made on foreign platforms and, as AKIT reported, 90 percent of these goods be in printed from Chinese online stores.